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    Can Berlin Really Afford 3 ‘Magic Flutes’ in a Single Week?

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    Each of the city’s opera houses is presenting a different production of the Mozart classic. With arts cuts looming, it looks like a last hurrah.Opera has always tended toward grandeur. Berlin, home to three world-class opera houses, regularly takes things to the next level.This week, for example, each of those houses is putting on a different production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” At one, larger-than-life serpents slither across the stage, spurting real fire from their nostrils. At another, animated pink elephants flying across a giant screen deliver a character to his salvation.But with cuts to the city arts budget looming, this looks increasingly like a last hurrah for a system of largess under threat.A scene from the Staatsoper’s “Magic Flute,” which reconstructs the staging of a 19th-century production.Monika RittershausNext week, Berlin’s Senate looks set to pass a 2025 budget that will slash funding to the arts scene, which relies heavily on public money. Institutions large and small have warned that these cuts put Berlin’s identity as a cultural capital on the chopping block.According to a plan released last month, culture funding, which makes up just over 2 percent of the municipal budget, will be reduced by around 13 percent, or about 130 million euros (roughly $136 million).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Pianist Who’s Not Afraid to Improvise on Mozart

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      Robert Levin has long argued that Mozart would have made up new material while performing, and he follows the master in a series of dazzling recordings.Robert Levin playing an excerpt of Mozart, whose complete works for keyboard and orchestra he has recently finished releasing on disc.Cadenzas are a concerto soloist’s time to shine: the moments when the rest of the orchestra dramatically drops out and a single musician gets the chance to command the stage.For about half of Mozart’s piano concertos, cadenzas he wrote have been preserved, and those are what you usually hear in concerts and on recordings. Other composers later filled in the gaps with cadenzas that have also become traditional. Some performers write their own.But 250 years ago, when Mozart was a star pianist, he wouldn’t have performed prewritten cadenzas — even ones he had composed.“When Mozart wrote his concertos, they were a vehicle for his skills,” the pianist and scholar Robert Levin said by telephone from Salzburg, Austria — Mozart’s hometown — where he teaches at the Mozarteum University. “He was respected as a composer and lionized as a performer, but it was as an improviser that he was on top of the heap.”Levin, 76, has long argued that Mozart, as a player, made up new cadenzas and ornaments in the moment. And he has sought to revive that spirit of improvisation in a landmark cycle of the concertos on period instruments, a 13-album project begun more than 30 years ago with the Academy of Ancient Music, led by Christopher Hogwood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lincoln Center’s Rebranded Orchestra Settles Into Its Debut Season

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      Compared with previous seasons, recent concerts by the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center were refreshingly casual, but also more mixed.With a new name and a new music director, Lincoln Center’s summer orchestra is getting a fresh start this season. On the evidence of three concerts over the past week and a half, though, the newly minted Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center is turning its focus to an element that has always been there: the players themselves.Last year was the final summer of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, which for 21 years had been led by the beloved Louis Langrée. The renamed ensemble’s music director, Jonathon Heyward, was a companionable host recently at the first concert of its season, which allowed audience members to vote on the pieces they’d like to hear. Between movements, Heyward called on a few players at their music stands to talk about their love of the composers. Some remarks seemed well-rehearsed, others extemporaneous. But all of them were sweet.There has been some worry about the organization’s legacy — that change represents a repudiation of the orchestra’s repertoire and mission. At his final concerts, Langrée himself pleaded with the audience to return and support the players.This year, the onstage conversations felt calculated to build a rapport between the players and the audience. Attendees were also invited to mingle with the musicians in the lobby of David Geffen Hall after each concert. All that talking had an interesting outcome: It left me more invested in individual musicians when they eventually played.Kazem Abdullah led a program that included Brahms’s Violin Concerto, with Benjamin Beilman as the soloist.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterAs in years past, each program was performed twice on consecutive nights. Avoiding heavy material, the concerts felt like a linen suit designed for comfort, ease and a touch of class on balmy days. There’s still substance, but it comes in the pleasing form of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Schumann (a Heyward favorite), rather than the portentous, densely textured works of Mahler and Strauss.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Memo to Orchestras: Do More Opera

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      The Cleveland Orchestra’s staging of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” was a reminder that ensembles can help fill the gap as opera grows harder to find.It was that rarest of sights when I walked into the Cleveland Orchestra’s hall on Sunday afternoon: a dark curtain drawn across the stage.Rare, that is, in a concert hall. Orchestras don’t tend to have dramatic unveilings before they start to play. And while Cleveland has done near-annual opera presentations over the past two decades, the ensemble has almost always been onstage alongside the singers, as the stagings have worked around (and sometimes incorporated) the presence of dozens of players.But for Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” which ended a sold-out four-performance run at Severance Music Center on Sunday, the orchestra was lowered into an honest-to-goodness pit, and the curtain was closed at the start, just as it would have been in an opera house.It was a reminder that opera — expensive to put on and not to everyone’s taste, though with a passionate fan base — has been ever harder to find in American cities. And a reminder that orchestras can — and should! — summon the resources to fill even a bit of that gap.As the Cleveland Orchestra’s president and chief executive, André Gremillet, said in an interview, “This city doesn’t otherwise have world-class opera.” Cleveland Opera, a company that did present world-class offerings for several decades, faded away about 15 years ago, and a couple of companies left in its wake offer just a smattering of smaller-scale performances.And yet there is a hunger for the art form, and an opportunity for orchestras around the country to expand their audiences. “There are people who are not here every week,” Gremillet said, “who will come to the opera — and more than once.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: An Absent Player in the Spotlight at the Philharmonic

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      This week’s program was supposed to feature the orchestra’s principal oboe, but he and another player have been suspended amid misconduct allegations.It’s rare that the most significant music in a concert is a piece that isn’t played. But this week’s program at the New York Philharmonic may end up being remembered for what was omitted.The performance on Wednesday, conducted by Jane Glover, was supposed to include Mozart’s Oboe Concerto, with the solo part taken by the orchestra’s principal oboe, Liang Wang. But he and the associate principal trumpet, Matthew Muckey, have been benched by the Philharmonic since allegations of misconduct and assault against them resurfaced last month.In 2018, those accusations prompted the orchestra to fire the two men; the players’ union then appealed to an arbitrator, who reinstated them in 2020. Now, as another investigation has begun and Wang and Muckey have sued the orchestra, saying they’ve been wrongfully suspended, it is unclear when — and whether — either will play on the stage of David Geffen Hall again.Rather than replace Wang, the Philharmonic swapped out Mozart’s Oboe Concerto with his Symphony No. 13 in F (K. 112). Written in 1771, when its composer was 15 and on a tour of Italy with his father, the symphony — just 13 minutes long — has that easygoing, tossed-off eloquence that’s evident even in Mozart’s teenage works. The first movement is sprightly; the second, gentle, scored for strings alone; the third, graceful. Best of all is the lively triple-time finale, which evokes the long history of courtly hunting music, with an alluring short section in minor key.The Philharmonic had never performed the symphony before Wednesday, and under Glover’s baton it flowed with the same nimble, unaffected naturalness as the rest of the program: four pieces, including three Mozart symphonies, from the final three decades of the 18th century. Glover’s tempos throughout the concert were sensible and unexaggerated, with ample room to breathe but no dragging, and the playing was lovely — though the violins sometimes took on a slightly thin, wiry edge, highlighted by the cool clarity of Geffen Hall’s acoustics.In the work not by Mozart — Beethoven’s “Ah! perfido,” a concert scene from five years after Mozart’s death but still very much within the world of his opera arias — the orchestra provided sensitive accompaniment for the soprano Karen Slack. Making her Philharmonic debut, she inhabited the piece’s shifting moods, from anger at a treacherous lover to vulnerability to proud resolution, with strikingly clear high notes by the end.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Chevalier’ Review: A Music-Theater Portrait of Joseph Boulogne

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      “The Chevalier,” an intriguing music-theater hybrid, unwraps the still little-known life and work of this 18th-century composer.Now, the composer Joseph Boulogne would be hailed as a Renaissance man: artist, athlete, intellectual, soldier. Born in Guadeloupe in 1745, the son of a white French plantation owner and an enslaved mother of Senegalese origin, Boulogne became a virtuoso violinist, prodigious composer, champion fencer, the general of Europe’s first Black regiment and an avid abolitionist.But Boulogne, a.k.a. the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (and whose last name is sometimes spelled “Bologne”), was a biracial man in a time and place that held little space for him, which means his remarkable life has largely been erased from the historical narrative, though that is beginning to change.“The Chevalier,” a trim hybrid of theater and music, seeks to revive his reputation. The show was written and directed by Bill Barclay, the artistic director of Music Before 1800. (Barclay also plays Choderlos de Laclos, a Boulogne collaborator and author of the novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”) A single performance at the eye-poppingly opulent United Palace theater in Washington Heights on Sunday served as its New York City premiere; it will be available to stream next month.“The Chevalier” starts rather unpromisingly. Barclay takes as his point of imaginative departure the few weeks that Boulogne and Mozart were housemates in Paris. Mozart, 11 years younger, grills Boulogne about his life story, and he responds with long, expository answers that hit on major biographical points — more school lecture than beguiling drama.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Review: This ‘Magic Flute’ at the Met Lacks Some Luster

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      Mozart’s opera, tailored to families in this staging, is big on spectacle and let’s-put-on-a-show verve. What shines? Kathryn Lewek as Queen of the Night.The evolution of Julie Taymor’s production of “Die Zauberflöte” from long-running hit to children’s-theater show at the Metropolitan Opera is now complete.Since the premiere of Taymor’s staging in 2004, her diaphanous puppets and George Tsypin’s translucent set pieces have brought a welcome weightlessness to Mozart’s hard-to-stage singspiel, which wraps fairy-tale monsters, young love and a Masonic quest in melodies of direct and abundant charm. This abridged version, in English, followed a few years later as a holiday show for families (though, at nearly two hours without intermission, it doesn’t exactly fly by).When the Met introduced a new production of the work by Simon McBurney last May that sees the world with a brand of childlike wonder that’s really meant for adults, it decided to keep Taymor’s puppets-and-plexiglass version as a separate, family-friendly entertainment that can be trotted out this time of year.This season’s run of the Taymor version, dubbed “The Magic Flute — Holiday Presentation,” opened on Friday with a rough let’s-put-on-a-show energy. The cast played broadly to its young audience. The orchestra, conducted by Patrick Furrer, sounded thin and tinny, lacking the mellow-gold shine that conveys nobility and transcendence in this score.On paper, it made sense to cast the tenor Rolando Villazón in the comic baritone role of Papageno. Now a stage director as well as a singer, he has largely given up the lyric tenor roles that catapulted him to the top of the opera world two decades ago. Still, he has charisma to burn, and Papageno is more or less the main character of this adaptation. Unfortunately, Villazón struggled with the low-for-him tessitura; his voice, tired and frayed, often floated around the center of the pitch when he wasn’t tweaking melodies to suit his range.It was sad to see an artist who was once capable of rare musical insight funnel his considerable creative energy into a frenetic, always-on physicality. Mimicking Woody Woodpecker’s laugh and Road Runner’s “meep meep!” he practically morphed into a cartoon. His improvisations and sprinklings of Spanish into the dialogue won over the audience, and his genuine rapport with the priest portrayed by Scott Scully, perhaps the Met’s funniest comprimario, was a joy.Kathryn Lewek, a scintillating Queen of the Night in McBurney’s production last season, returned to the role for this holiday run.Evan ZimmermanJanai Brugger (Pamina) and Brindley Sherratt (Sarastro) sounded a bit colorless in the first half, but their voices ripened as the show progressed. As the opera’s hero Tamino, the tenor Piotr Buszewski could be sensitive, but too often his singing came across as overcooked.Kathryn Lewek, a scintillating Queen of the Night in McBurney’s production last season, returned to the role for this holiday run. Regardless of what was going on around her, she sang like she was on the stage of one of the world’s foremost lyric theaters. “O zittre nicht,” in particular, was captivating with its soft tone, graceful lyricism and sharply etched coloratura. Putting aside a dry note here and there, “Der Hölle Rache” had impressive point, and the triplets tumbled seamlessly.Chuckles and puppets make for a fun night with the kids, but singing like Lewek’s is what the magic of opera is all about.The Magic FluteThrough Dec. 30 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Ingrid Haebler, Pianist Known for Her Mastery of Mozart, Is Dead

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      In concerts and on dozens of recordings, she applied a delicate touch that critics said set her apart from other performers.Ingrid Haebler, a pianist who drew particular acclaim for her performances and recordings of the works of Mozart, impressing critics while still in her 20s with elegant interpretations that set her apart from other musicians of her day, died on May 14. She was believed to be 96.Decca Classics, which last year released “Ingrid Haebler: The Philips Legacy,” a boxed set of dozens of recordings she made for the Philips label, posted news of her death on Facebook. The Austrian newspaper The Salzburger Nachrichten reported her death, attributing the information to her circle of friends, but did not say where she died.Ms. Haebler was born in Vienna, probably on June 20, 1926 (some news reports said 1929). Her father was a baron. Her mother played piano and began teaching Ingrid when she was a young child; she gave her first public performance at 11. They lived in Poland when Ingrid was young but settled in Austria in the late 1930s.As a teenager, she wrote poetry and dabbled in composing. But at 19 she decided to focus fully on piano — “I had to kill a lot of my interests,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia in 1964. She trained at the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria and in the early 1950s began earning accolades at European piano competitions. By 1954, recordings she made for Vox with the Pro Musica Symphony of Vienna were drawing notice in the United States.“Ingrid Haebler: The Philips Legacy,” a boxed set of dozens of recordings, was released last year by Decca Classics.“A delicate — but not finicky, to make the distinction — articulation of Mozart that is uncommon today is the way Ingrid Haebler plays the A major (K. 414) and B-flat major (K. 595) Piano Concertos,” Cyrus Durgin, a music critic for The Boston Globe, wrote in August 1954, reviewing one of those records. “You will always find people (including musicians) defending or attacking this manner, but it does meet Mozart’s requirement that his keyboard music ‘flow like oil and water.’”That same year she performed as a soloist in England with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Mozart was her calling card, but she proved an adept interpreter of other composers as well, as she did in 1956 when she played a program of Mozart, Haydn and Schubert at Wigmore Hall in London. She “captured and held spellbound her audience,” The Daily Telegraph of Britain wrote.By 1958, The Bristol Evening Post reported, her stature was such that, at the Bath Festival, she felt free to reject the Steinway that was provided to her during the practice session and sent the organizers scrambling to find another piano.At that festival, she further showed that there was more to her than Mozart. She played Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and impressed The Daily Telegraph of Britain. “Without ever invoking a spurious foresight of the Beethoven that was to come,” the newspaper wrote, “she placed the work in the 18th century, yet across the gulf that already separated him from Mozart.”Ms. Haebler in 1959. “The poise and simplicity of Ms. Haebler’s Mozart,” one critic wrote, “is a rare treat.”The New York TimesIn October 1959 she made her American debut in Minneapolis with the Minneapolis Symphony, playing the Mozart Piano Concerto in B-flat.“The acclaim of the audience brought the pianist back to the stage five times,” Ross Parmenter wrote in a review in The New York Times, “and the members of the orchestra joined in the applause.”Ms. Haebler, who was a baroness but did not use the title, was still impressing audiences with her Mozart interpretations in 1976, when, at Hunter College, she played her first New York recital, augmenting her program with works by Schubert and Debussy but shining as usual on the Mozart selections.“This was cloudless, untroubled Mozart,” Donal Henahan wrote in a review in The Times, “in line with the last century’s view of him as a miraculously blessed child.”Ms. Haebler continued to tour until early in this century. On her numerous recordings, many of them for Philips, she covered a range of composers, but again it was often the Mozart recordings that stood out. Reviewing her recording of Mozart sonatas in 1990 for The Kingston Whig-Standard of Ontario, the critic Richard Perry zeroed in on what made her refreshingly different.“In a concert world rife with pianists of dazzling technique who seemed forced by competition and cavernous concert halls to demonstrate their mettle at every turn,” he wrote, “the poise and simplicity of Ms. Haebler’s Mozart is a rare treat.”Information on Ms. Haebler’s survivors was not immediately available.Christopher F. Schuetze More